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solreefs · 2 years

Text

Do Not Open

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Summary: This is Postulant Izumi Himura, recording the statement of Scholar Sumit Mahanta. Statement concerns... a coffin. And that’s all it says here. Incident occurred in 2012. Statement given October 23, 2013. Recorded June 9, 2031.

Warnings: none that I can think of

Tagging: @gay-otlc

Words: 2442

A note on worldbuilding: The previous chapter mentioned a Codex. This has been changed to a phone. Technology is fairly modern in this AU, but the Institute definitely monitors personal communications. Also, I’m not going to rewrite every single statement, and this is certainly not going to be 200 chapters long, just to clarify.

ao3

[CLICK]

Izumi: This is Postulant Izumi Himura, recording the statement of Scholar Sumit Mahanta. Statement concerns... [paper rustle] a coffin. [pause] And that’s all it says here.

[clears throat] Incident occurred in 2012. Statement given October 23, 2013. Recorded June 9, 2031.

Statement begins.

Izumi (statement): At the time of writing this, it’s been about three years since I first moved into the apartment where it all happened. I finished near the top of my Postulant class in the Lingua department at the age of eighteen, and received a silver band placement here at the Alexandria branch of the Institute. My relatively young age and lack of experience meant my paycheck was not, shall we say, overly generous, but I quite liked the apartment. It was small, but it suited me. I had enough space for the essentials, the building itself was well-maintained, and my neighbors were generally pleasant. I suppose none of that really matters, but I need you to understand that this was exactly the last place in Alexandria you would expect something like this to happen.

I’d been living there for about a year by the time I got the package. I was heading home after a late night translating some works requested by the Institute branch in Delhi, and all I wanted to do was sleep. There was a white delivery van parked outside my apartment building, and in the faint glow from the streetlights, I could just make out the words “Breekon and Hope Deliveries” printed on the side. It briefly occurred to me what an odd sight that was so late at night, but honestly I was too tired to really think about it. I walked past the van and up of the building, when the side door of the van opened, and two enormous delivery men stepped out.

“Are you Mr. Mahanta?” one of them asked me. He had an odd, exaggerated accent, like something out of a cartoon.

“Package for you,” the other one said, holding out a clipboard.

I stared at them like they had grown second heads. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”

“Friend of yours said to make sure this gets to you,” the first one said.

The second handed me the clipboard. “You’ve got to sign for it.”

“Protocol, you understand,” added the first, offering me a pen.

I took the pen from him and signed my name at the bottom of the delivery form, unsure what else to do. The first man went around and opened the back of the van. He and his partner unloaded an enormous box, and carried it between the two of them up to the apartment building’s door. I followed them down the front hall, into the elevator up to the third floor, and to the door of my apartment. They waited for me to unlock the door, but I had made up my mind that I was not going to let these two into my home. I told them to leave the box in the hallway, and they did, thankfully without any protests, and left.

The box turned out to be even heavier than it looked, and it was quite a struggle to get it into my apartment. It was like the box had a… gravity to it; the floor seemed to bend underneath it, and everything in the room sort of looked like it leaned toward it, although that could have been just my sleep-deprived imaginings. But I managed it, and once I had dragged it into the middle of my tiny living room, I went to bed, too exhausted to deal with any more strangeness that night.

The next day, I got up, made myself a strong cup of coffee, and forced myself to walk into the living room and examine the box. It was addressed to me in neat, precise handwriting, but the return address was covered up by an ominous smear of mud. I set to work peeling away the packaging tape, and when I got the lid of the box open, I froze.

It was a coffin. It was made of old, pale wood that was oddly warm to the touch, and fastened with a padlock on an ice-cold metal chain. It looked too small to hold a person, and if there was anything dead inside, it couldn’t have been in there for very long, since I couldn’t smell anything. I stood staring at the coffin for almost a full minute before I realized there was something else inside the box.

A rusted key and a folded note. I reached for the note first, and unfolded it, hoping to get some answers as to what, exactly, was going on here. It read as follows:

Sumit,

I know we’ve had our differences, but I hope you will do me the favor of looking after this package for me. Don’t worry, you won’t have to hold it for long. I’ll be back before you know it.

-Anthony

His last name was obscured by an dirt smudge similar to the one covering the return address, but I didn’t need to see it to know who he was. I recognized the signature, even a year later. Anthony Veralt and I had been Postulants around the same time, though he was studying in the History department, and to say we’d had our differences was an understatement.

Anthony and I were roommates at Ptolemy House. The first real conversation we had was an argument over the answer to a math problem, and that pretty much set the tone for all our future interactions. We fought over everything from the shower to ethics of the Institute’s policy of not getting directly involved in outside affairs. By the time Postulant training was done, I was ready to strangle him, and the feeling was definitely mutual. Thank the gods we were studying in different fields, or one of us might have just gone through with it. Both of us were quite vocal about never wanting to see each other again.

So receiving any kind of mail from him would have been strange, let alone something like this. My shock was fading into intellectual curiosity by now, and I turned the paper over to see if there was some sort of postscript I had missed that might offer me more concrete answers, but there wasn’t. I folded the note up again and reached for the key. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of opening the coffin, but I didn’t see any other way to find out more about it. As I was moving to put the key in the padlock, I noticed something on the coffin lid.

Three words, scratched deep into the wood. Do Not Open.

I set the key down. I needed more information, and who better to get it from than the man who sent me the damned thing in the first place?

I sent in a message to my supervisor that I was sick that day, and set off to find Anthony Veralt. Asking around the history department revealed that he’d only been coming in sporadically, working overtime for a week straight and then vanishing for two or three weeks at a time. No one had been able to get ahold of him outside of work for several months. Interesting, but unhelpful. I asked whether they’d acquired any new artifacts recently, and they hadn’t. So where had that coffin come from?

I went home and tried doing more research, but couldn’t find anything that covered locked coffins with keys that you weren’t supposed to use, so I read up on traditions surrounding death and funerals around the world, hoping to turn up something even slightly relevant, but had no luck.

I went into work the next day like nothing had happened. It was clear I wasn’t going to get any answers just staying home, and maybe I could do some research in the Institute library during my lunch break.

As weird as it sounds, I started to get used to having the coffin around. It began to just sort of blend into the background of my home. So much so that about two weeks later, I set a stack of books down on it without thinking anything of it until something inside it began to move.

It was a very slight movement at first, so slight that at first I doubted I had heard anything at all. But then the scratching sound grew louder, more insistent. I swept the books off the lid with shaking hands, and the sound stopped. I stood staring at the coffin in utter bewilderment. If there had been anything alive in there to begin with, it should have been long dead.

I took a deep breath, and then very deliberately placed a book on the other end of the lid. The scratching began again almost instantly, and this time when I removed the book, it took nearly five minutes to stop. I decided against doing a third experiment.

At that point, a braver soul than I might have opened the coffin to see what it was that scratched at the lid, but I have never been daring at the best of times. So I instead did my best to ignore it. I rationalized my decision by telling myself that Anthony was eventually coming to pick it up, so it wasn’t like I would have to deal with it forever, and the words on the lid made it very clear that I would regret looking inside. In truth, I was just scared.

About a week later, we got one of our rare rains, and the coffin... moaned. It was an almost melodious sound, sort of like singing. I watched it carefully, but the scratching sound didn’t start up again, and the coffin made no other noise or movement.

So that was that, apparently. The coffin would scratch at anything placed on the lid, moan when it rained, and I just sort of left it alone. For the most part, this worked out fine.

Except at night. I started having the strangest dreams, and although I could only ever remember flashes of what they had been about, they always left me deeply unsettled. I would almost always wake up struggling to breathe through an enormous pressure on my chest.

I started sleepwalking, too. Not every night, but often enough to be a concern, especially because I always woke up with the coffin key in my hand. I hid the key in ever more elaborate places, but I always found it. Eventually, my solution was to stop myself before I could leave my bedroom. I would lock my door, and deliberately leave books on the floor so that I would wake myself up by stepping on them or tripping over them. It worked well enough, though I did once end up with a broken toe.

And that was my life for almost a full year. I mentioned earlier that the coffin had this kind of gravity to it, and as the months passed, this effect only increased, to the point where the floor was noticeably dented underneath it, and I swear all my furniture was tilting towards it, especially my shelves. When I tried to move the coffin, it was so heavy I couldn’t even get a decent grip on it. Towards the end of the year, though, the room began to seem less tilted, and the depression in the floor gradually became less pronounced. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when one day in December, I opened my apartment door to find those two delivery men standing there.

Anthony was there too, and that did surprise me. He actually seemed a little taken aback when I answered the door, like he’d thought I wouldn’t be home. He thanked me for looking after the coffin for him, I told him to go fuck himself, and he laughed and asked me for the key. I gave it to him, and told him that if he wanted to open this thing, he was not going to do it in my home. Anthony shrugged, and told the delivery men to take the coffin outside, which they did.

I shut the door firmly behind them, and closed the curtains. I didn’t want to see what they would find in there.

Only when the screaming stopped did I part the curtains and look out into the street. The two delivery men were getting into their van, and there was no sign of Anthony.

I moved out of the apartment a few days later, and since then I’ve applied every time an opportunity to be transferred has come up. It’s almost a pity; I really do like Alexandria, but… I just don’t think I can stay here anymore.

Izumi: Statement ends.

Scholar Mahanta was transferred to the Institute’s branch in Petra, Jordan, three weeks after giving this statement. Glain attempted to contact him, but he was, ah, disinterested in continuing the investigation any further.

Scholar Anthony Veralt was reported missing on December 14, 2012, by one of his neighbors. A search of his home did reveal receipts from several transactions with Breekon and Hope Deliveries, but the investigation ultimately turned up no real leads, and he was never found.

Thomas looked into Breekon and Hope Deliveries, but it’s based in Cairo, not Alexandria, and hasn’t been in business since 2024. If they kept any records of their deliveries, we’ve been unable to find them.

[pause]

Wolfe doesn’t believe this statement, and I concede that there’s little actual evidence that any of this really took place, but... I don’t know. I’ve worked on a dozen discredited statements in the past two weeks in some form or another, and this one feels different somehow. More real.

Heavier.

[CLICK]

Thomas: -strange, don’t you think?

Jess: What is?

Thomas: That everyone outside of the Institute knows so little about all of this.

Jess: Probably because so few people ever run into this kind of thing. Think about it. We must have worked on dozens of statements since we started here in May, but only what, two? have been at all convincing.

Thomas: I know, it’s just... the Institute’s trying to keep this a secret, and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

Jess: (not really paying attention) Mm. Maybe. What did you get for this question?

Thomas: C. You’re not listening, are you?

Jess: It is a little odd, but there’s nothing you can do. Focus on surviving Postulant training first.

Thomas: I suppose. Speaking of which, we’ll be up at dawn tomorrow, so I’m going to bed.

[CLICK]

#statement begins #Arin writes #the great library #had fun with this one!#also i will respond to comments on chapter 1 i just wanted to finish and post this first

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